Ahmad Chalabi Is on the Brink of a Comeback
BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 9, 2005
URL: nysun.com
WASHINGTON - The former Iraqi exile leader who helped found the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, is seeking his country's highest office and says he has accepted an informal nomination to be prime minister.
In a phone interview yesterday with The New York Sun, Mr. Chalabi said he had said yes to the request from prominent members of the United Iraqi Alliance list, the slate of candidates that will likely control a majority of seats in the transitional national assembly to be announced in the coming days.
Among Mr. Chalabi's supporters is the leader of a resistance against Saddam Hussein in southern Iraq in 1991, Abdul Karim Al Muhammadawi, known as the "prince of the marshes." Mr. Chalabi has also garnered support from a former member of the Iraqi Governing Council, Salama al-Khufaji,who is one of the highest-ranking women on the UIA list. Mr. Chalabi also draws support from the Shiite Political Council, the organization he helped build this summer after he was excluded from the interim government headed by Prime Minister Allawi.
If Mr. Chalabi manages to secure enough support to be prime minister of Iraq, it will mark an extraordinary comeback for the man most analysts wrote off last May, when American and Iraqi soldiers raided his home and confiscated computers on charges that he had employed thugs to bully bureaucrats in the finance ministry. Throughout last summer, Mr. Chalabi was targeted by an untrained judge appointed by the Americans; all charges were eventually dropped. The CIA had written off the former banker as having no political base in Iraq, while leading Democratic politicians blamed him for fabricating intelligence on Saddam Hussein's links to Al Qaeda and arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
Yesterday, Mr. Chalabi said he harbored no ill will towards his old nemeses in Washington and went out of his way to thank the American people, the American military, and President Bush for liberating Iraq. He even found kind words for Jordan, which has an outstanding warrant from a military court for his arrest in connection with his role in the collapse of the Petra Bank. Mr. Chalabi is suing the Jordanian government in federal district court in Washington for racketeering in connection with the bank collapse.
"I am always a friend of the Jordanian people," he told the Sun. "I lived there a long time. I will not comment on this issue other than to say the sting of animosity from some quarters in Jordan against me has been taken out."
In the race for prime minister, Mr. Chalabi's chief rivals are other Shiite politicians, such as the current finance minister, Adel Abdel-Mehdi, who this week rejected a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. Another aspirant to head the Iraqi government is the current leader of the Dawa party, Ibrahim Jafari. Mr. Jafari was a vice president in the Allawi government, but has been a vocal critic of Mr. Allawi in the run-up to the election.
"Chalabi will be influential. He is a force to be reckoned with. He has shown substantial political skills. But in this situation, I think the Shiites will want to choose one of their own, that is their inclination," an Iraq specialist for the Congressional Research Service ho is a former CIA analyst, Kenneth Katzman, said yesterday. "I don't think they can necessarily trust him. He has been with the Americans, now he is not with the Americans. He is not Islamist and he is secular."
A former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, Michael Rubin, said yesterday that it was too soon to predict who would be the next leader of Iraq. "We are in the primaries. What matters now is that they know who the candidates are, so let the horse-trading begin."
Iraq's election commission is currently counting the ballots Iraqis cast on January 30. According to Iraqi sources, the UIA is likely to receive anywhere from 51% of the seats in the new assembly to more than 60%. The next-highest voting bloc will be the Kurdish slate with Mr. Allawi's party running a distant third.
In the interview yesterday, Mr. Chalabi said one of his main goals would be to open up the heavily guarded "green zone" in the middle of Baghdad to regular Iraqi citizens. Since the fall of Saddam, the palaces and grand hotels that marked the epicenter of the Baathist tyranny have been turned into living quarters and offices, first for coalition officials and later the interim government.
"Symbols of sovereignty must be returned to the Iraqi people through their government. The republican palace is one of the most important symbols, it must be returned to the Iraqi people," Mr. Chalabi said. He added that President al-Yawar has said that President Bush was unaware that the republican palace of Saddam has been virtually off-limits to Iraqis and agreed that the situation should be changed. "We are acutely aware of the security concerns of the United States, and there are sites on the periphery of Baghdad which we will provide to them willingly," Mr. Chalabi said.
Mr. Chalabi also said that he expected the new government to focus on rooting out Baathist elements in the security services that are sympathetic to terrorists. "On the issue of security services, the security plan implemented since the transfer of sovereignty has failed. The number of attacks has more than doubled on a daily average," he said. "That means we believe a major problem has been the introduction of former regime elements at a high level in the intelligence service and the National Guard. It is important to review the background of these people meticulously."
He said he expected the new security services would target geographic areas where the insurgency was strongest, but that he would also fight to make sure the country's courts actually tried terrorists, complaining that there have been no trials for terrorists and many times they have been released after their arrest. "The role of the executive branch in Iraq has been too strong," he said. "We must make the judicial branch stronger and fortify it in order for it to stand up to the executive."
Mr. Chalabi said he agrees with human-rights advocates who wanted to make sure Iraq did not turn into a tyranny of the majority. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal ran an essay by Iraqi author and human rights activist Kanan Makiya warning the ascendant Shiite political class to eschew the confessional politics of ethnicity and religion and help build an inclusive political Iraq. Mr. Chalabi said he agreed with Mr. Makiya without reservation. "We do not want ethnic-or sectarian-based politics in Iraq. But saying it does not make it happen," Mr. Chalabi said. "We believe we are able to do that because we will have another election and write a constitution that will make sectarianism impossible in the new Iraq."
To that end, Mr. Chalabi said that in the coming months, he did not expect the UIA slate or Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani (the world's leading authority on Shiite religious doctrine) to support a constitution that made Islam the sole source of Iraqi law. Stressing that he was not speaking in any way for Mr. Sistani, Mr. Chalabi said, "Ayatollah Sistani is a man who, if anything, is very keen to be consistent. The platform of the UIA, which he basically blessed, contains a reference to the role of Islam in Iraq which is not far from the transitional administrative law, which only said it was one source."
Mr. Chalabi said that he wanted to rethink the presence of some 20,000 security contractors in Iraq and try to give these jobs to Iraqis who will do a better job at security. "Their presence is not welcome at this time and their utility is very limited. They also present a heavy burden on the Iraqi economy, padded in security costs. This is not the way to do it," he said. "We are not going to do anything drastic without coordination and careful planning, but we need to examine ways of doing this differently." The issue is likely to come up in any negotiation of a Status of Forces Agreement. The Coalition Provisional Authority granted security contractors immunity from Iraqi law.
In the interview, Mr. Chalabi's voice was noticeably excited. On three different occasions, he waxed effusively about the historic significance of the elections in which he just ran. He even said, "These elections will have an influence on the democratic movement in Iran." For Mr. Chalabi, who has been accused anonymously of passing American signal intelligence to the Iranians by the CIA and maintained State Department-funded offices in Iran for years before Iraq's liberation, the statement was significant. Mr. Chalabi has denied passing intelligence to the Iranians and has challenged Congress to hold an open hearing at which he could face his accusers on the issue.
Mr. Chalabi said the impact of the elections would reach the entire Islamic world. "Iraqi people voted out a government which had the support of the United States and 150,000 troops in Iraq, with funding 50 times more than the other lists combined, especially on TV time. They did that in the face of major threats by terrorists. The Iraqi people demonstrated this can happen."
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